Manchester City top Madrid and Barca as kings of world sports salaries

A new study has claimed that the Premier League giants are the globe’s biggest paymasters, outstripping Real Madrid and Barcelona

Manchester City players are the best-paid sportsmen in the world, according to a new survey.

The English League Cup winners came in top of Sporting Intelligence’s 2014 Global Sports Salaries Survey, with their first-team squad members reported to earn an average annual wage of €5,864,675 over the course of 2013-14. Real Madrid are football’s second highest paymasters, paying their players almost €5.5m per year on average, while Barcelona come third with a mean first-team salary of just under €5.4m.

The Manchester outfit are the only sports club in the world paying more than renowned baseball giants New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers, with Madrid and Barca the fourth and fifth across all sports.

THE PAY LEAGUE | Sport’s biggest wage bills

RANK

CLUB

SPORT

AVERAGE WAGE

1

Manchester City

Football

€5,864,675

2

New York Yankees

Baseball

€5,810,543

3

Los Angeles Dodgers

Baseball

€5,627,073

4

Real Madrid

Football

€5,488,391

5

Barcelona

Football

€5,387,198

6

Brooklyn Nets

Basketball

€4,930,297

7

Bayern Munich

Football

€4,840,030

8

Manchester United

Football

€4,751,643

9

Chicago Bulls

Basketball

€4,381,386

10

Chelsea

Football

€4,380,101

11

Arsenal

Football

€4,288,906

12

New York Knicks

Basketball

€4,245,234

Source: Sporting Intelligence

Bayern Munich are the only other non-Premier League club to be included in the top 12 of the survey, with their players collecting the seventh-highest salaries in sport. Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal also made the dozen clubs on the list.

While Real Madrid and Barcelona have some of the world’s most well-known players on their books in the shape of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi respectively, Manchester City have a string of high-earning stars on their wage bill. Yaya Toure, Sergio Aguero and David Silva are all reported to be earning more than €250,000 per week, bumping up their first-team average to a weekly wage of €112,000.